10 March 2024 , 13:00
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Wearing a seatbelt is now so engrained in our psyche that it feels wrong to not put one on as soon as you get into the car.
Survival is far more likely in an accident if you're wearing a seatbelt, and therefore it became a legal requirement to wear one back in 1983.
Now a resufraced safety advert from the Nineties is leaving people horrified, with many questioning how it was ever allowed to air. The campaign hoped to shock people into following the law on seatbelts, but looking back, it's hard to imagine this clip showing on our TV screens.
The 1998 advert, which allegedly caused seatbelt use to rise by 23% according to Think, is still haunting people to this day, with many remembering the way it made them feel at the time - and the general consensus was that it mortified people into putting their belts on.
Please note that the below video contains graphic scenes you may find upsetting:
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The 'Julie' advert from 'Think' road safety was a step up from the 1997 'King of the Road' hedgehog ad, which featured adorable hedgehogs insisting you 'use your head and then your feet' so you can be road safe.
The film starts with a woman and her daughter sitting in the front of a car. The woman's son is running late, so he rushes into the back seat, without putting his belt on. The voice-over says: "Like most victims, Julie knew her killer", as the woman looks behind her in the mirror as she drove.
She was focusing so much on the van behind her - who was driving up close - that she missed the car in front. The voice-over then says: "It was her son", as he smacked into her, blood splattering the windshield. "He was sitting behind her without a seatbelt", the voice continued, as her son slumped back into his seat.
Julie's daughter could be seen in the seat next to her mum, screaming, as the voiceover continued: "After crushing her to death, he sat back down." The shocking ad then encouraged people to "belt up in the back, for everybody's sake."
In the comments on the video, people were reminiscing about how horrified the ad had made them when they were younger, saying that more adverts need to be shown like that these days to encourage good road safety.
Someone penned: "Thank you to Cartoon Network for playing this ad in the early 2000s during early weekday mornings and frightening me to heck that one time from doing that." Another said: "I remember this ad, it terrified the bejesus out of me as a child and ensured that I always belted up while in a car!"
Someone else wrote: "I'd hate to be the boy. Imagine living your life knowing your mother is dead because of your carelessness. Brilliant way of getting a message across. Terrifying though!" "This one stuck with me", a social media user shared, and another asked: "How did this manage to get greenlit on TV back then?"